


Crossing Borders

by amfiguree



Category: Missing Brendan (Film)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-10
Updated: 2014-01-10
Packaged: 2018-01-08 05:54:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1129110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/amfiguree/pseuds/amfiguree
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In life, sometimes the people you lose are the only lessons you ever learn.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Crossing Borders

Once they find the parachute, it only takes a couple of hours for the body to turn up. The digging markers are deconstructed, arrangements made for them to be picked up at the nearest airstrip the next morning, bags and equipment quickly stowed away.   
  
His grandfather clutches the dog tag the whole time, face flushed with color. The cool metal steals heat from his skin, like penance, fixing his heart better than any prescription can.  
  
Patrick grins at his dad, feels the solid weight of his dad's hand on his shoulder, the warmth in his uncle's laugh. "We found him," Sean says, his voice a shade too rough and his eyes too bright. "We found the fucking son of a bitch."   
  
Patrick looks away, guarding his uncle's privacy, and catches Tuyet's gaze. Her hands – small, slender, _gorgeous_ hands – are cupped around her grandfather's elbows. She smiles at him, sweet and sad and knowing, and Patrick's shoulders feel weighted down long after his dad's hand falls away.  
  
  
When he kisses her that night it's nothing but desperate, frantic heat, his hands on her cheek, her jaw, her neck. She catches his wrists, then, pinning them between their bodies, and he can feel her pulse against his skin like it's his own, a wild thing: _da-dum, da-da-dum, da-dum_.   
  
She's warm everywhere she's touching him, shoulders, palms, mouth. But there's no winter here, he thinks. "You – you're just like the climate," he tells her, muffled in between the slant of her lips. He can't name another use for the heat of her body but this: fitting against him and whispering his name and _being_ with him.  
  
She pulls away when she laughs, and he watches her, grinning himself. She smells like old spice and coconut, a strange scent, different, and when he closes the distance between them he wonders if it will linger. He brushes his thumb over the line of her jaw, then leans in, kisses her again. This can't be their last time. Can't be, not when they've barely had a first. "Tuyet," he says, voice hushed, carried away on the wind, as if to be spread like a badly-kept secret. "I think—"  
  
"Patrick," she interrupts. Then she hesitates, the pause coming easily; they've done it a million times. Sometimes she doesn't have the words, doesn't know the ones she doesn't have to use to get by day to day. She gestures when that happens, tries to explain in her own language like that will help Patrick understand. After the first few weeks, he learns, picks up Vietnamese in stilted, halting phrases.   
  
This time, the silence is different. She presses a hand to his cheek, and he leans into it. It's anyone's guess whether instinct has steered him wrong. The crickets sing.  
  
"Please," she says finally, gaze averted, voice quiet, melodic as always. "Please."  
  
He understands.  
  
  
There is no tearful send off.  
  
They sit for hours that night, huddled together despite the heat, thighs touching as they talk about everything and nothing like their time isn't running out, like he doesn't have a plane and a family and a whole different continent waiting to be returned to. Just before dawn breaks, she slips out from under his arm, her fingers warm on his skin, then in his hand. She has to go, she says, as he tightens his grasp on her in muted confusion.  
  
"Grandfather don't like airplanes," she explains. Always explanations between them, the result of two worlds never meant to collide. One of her hands is still carded in his hair.  
  
Patrick just nods, then, and lets her go. She gives him one last kiss, brief, over his temple.  
  
"Tuyet."  
  
She looks at him over her shoulder, face half caught in the pale golden light of the morning. He raises a hand, fingers faltering as though unsure of the gesture's intent. She ducks her head, smile shy, and he remembers – _the day at the shop, that same smile, such a pretty name, and then later at this same waterfall, so much and too little, not enough_ – and then she disappears.  
  
Patrick sits there for a moment longer, watching the water ripple in the light. He doesn't follow her. Doesn't need to. They move like plates, with a natural chemistry that judders the earth when they gently brush up alongside each other. Aligned, if only for a moment. If only until they continue down their own separate trajectories.  
  
  
He gets back to camp later than he should. For once, there is no reprimand from his father, no accusatory glare. The site is completely cleared, everything that'd marked their presence there wiped clean. He hikes his backpack up, feels his uncle's eyes on his back. But it's Julie who comes to him, pulling him into the backseat of the car and resting a gentle hand on his head. "Don't lose yourself to this," she says, quietly enough that no one else will hear, or else they can pretend not to. "She wasn't why you came here."   
  
"Were we?" he asks, bitter and tired and angry. He knows why they came, why they're leaving. Everything else was a distraction. Julie's hand is cool to the touch, nothing like Tuyet's. Nothing like the caress of the humid Asian wind against his cheek. He doesn't pull away.  
  
"No," she admits, the words barely more than a hum. "But sometimes things happen."  
  
"Life happened," he tells her, looking back out the window. Green, so green, and the sun is brighter than anything they ever get back home.  
  
  
He falls asleep once they're airborne, a deep, dreamless sleep, and doesn't wake when Julie leaves, nor sees the gentle kiss she presses to his dad's cheek. "Take care, Patrick," she whispers in his ear, before she's gone. He doesn't even stir.  
  
  
They take turns saying goodbye to Uncle Brendan before the funeral. They've all been carrying so much around; his grandfather bends low, grieving but not, and then his father, and Uncle Sean, rasping things like _I'm sorry_ and _soon_ and _if I could do it again_. Patrick's last, but he doesn't know what to say, doesn't know that it's any use; farewells are for the living, not the dead. He's never met his uncle, never knew him, and all the pride and relief at having him back cannot change that.   
  
  
They bury his uncle later that day.  
  
Bury him again, only with four pairs of hands instead of one, last rites performed and a proper coffin, no parachute and no dog tag, away from the wet, sticky heat of Vietnam.   
  
A part of Patrick goes down with him.


End file.
